New York City is getting a new version of the bottomless cup of coffee.

A subscription-model coffee club, in which customers can pay a monthly fee to get unlimited java from selected cafes, launches Monday in the city after a successful run in Israel.

The CUPS mobile app is designed to compete with the smartphone-driven loyalty card programs offered by coffee giants Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Not surprisingly, the price varies depending on the customer’s preferred high-end coffee. New Yorkers who prefer espresso will pay a monthly fee of $85 for unlimited coffee at about 40 independent cafes citywide.

A subscription from unlimited brewed, drip, pour-over or filtered coffee or tea is $45 a month. Read More »

When snowstorms pounded the Northeast and Midwest this week, a slew of parents were hanging on the mathematical predictions of a New Jersey teenager.

David Sukhin, a 19-year-old sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the brains behind Snow Day Calculator, a website and app that gives the likelihood of school closings for snow and cold based on your zipcode and the type of school (public, private, etc.). Read More »

A screenshot of Way2ride, which lets cab passengers pay without a card swipe or cash.

As New York City taxi riders experiment with smartphone apps to hail yellow cabs, one feature taking root in other cities isn’t yet available here: bypassing the meter, the card swipe or the wad of cash and simply paying with a tap of the phone.

That will soon change. VeriFone Systems Inc., which provides the payment consoles in roughly half of the city’s 13,000 taxis, has launched a new app of its own to allow riders to pay at any point in a cab ride.

That means coming one step closer to the ideal that regulators, app developers, and some riders have long desired: a “frictionless” payment process, where riders arrive at their destination and simply get out of the cab. Payment and credit card information, including a tip, is transferred via the app to the taxi console, and a receipt is logged in the app’s records for later review. Read More »

New Yorkers may soon be able to hail yellow cabs with their smartphones, depending on the outcome of a state appeals court case that’s expected to be decided this month.

Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal

Travis Kalanick, founder of start-up Uber, which lets users summon a luxury taxi with the help of GPS and the push of a button on their smartphone, pictured in California in 2011.

The Bloomberg administration and app developers Uber Technologies Inc. and Hailo Network USA Inc. thought they had finally gotten an official go-ahead to launch apps that would let pedestrians flag down one of the city’s 13,000 yellow cabs with the tap of a smartphone screen.

But after a judge gave the companies a greenlight, a coalition of livery and black car companies appealed the decision and persuaded an appellate court to put the launch on hold. A decision on the appeal is expected May 20.

The crux of their legal argument centers on whether the city regulators overstepped their authority in accommodating smartphone users.

The attorney for the livery companies, Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor, argued in an appeals brief that the city’s taxi commission had overstepped its mandate by issuing rules to permit e-hailing apps as part of a pilot program. The new app rules are a “sweeping change” that should have been made by the City Council, not by a regulatory body like the Taxi and Limousine Commission, Mr. Mastro argued.

Travis Kalanick, founder of start-up Uber, which lets users summon a luxury taxi with the help of GPS and the push of a button on their smartphone, pictured in California in 2011.

By Anjali Athavaley

Uber Technologies Inc., a technology company working on apps that enable people to hail cabs and car services with their smartphones, is expanding its offices in Long Island City.

San Francisco-based Uber is expanding to occupy the entire 12,000-square-foot building at 27-55 Jackson Ave. It moved into the three-story building in November, renting 3,200 square feet.

The expansion is coming despite possible legal hurdles to apps that enable people to hail yellow cabs with their phones.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission had approved the use of apps made by Uber and Hailo Network USA Inc. A state judge in Manhattan ruled that the city acted properly in launching a one-year pilot program. But the opponents of e-hailing, a coalition of livery car companies, appealed, and were granted an emergency injunction last week. Read More »

The ZabKab taxi-hailing app and others like it are cleared to enter the New York City market following a court ruling Tuesday.

New Yorkers could soon begin catching yellow taxis with their smartphones, a state judge ruled Tuesday, rejecting a bid from livery-car companies to block regulators from allowing use of taxi-hailing apps.

An earlier ruling by Justice Carol Huff of State Supreme Court in Manhattan had temporarily blocked the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission from launching its one-year pilot program for “e-hailing,” which opponents argued went beyond the TLC’s authority and would upend rules prohibiting cabbies from pre-arranging fares.

TLC officials had said that the program would take an evolving technology in use in other cities — smartphone apps that let customers hail taxi drivers from afar — and bring it within the rules that govern New York’s highly regulated market.

In her ruling, Justice Huff said the plaintiffs failed to show that the city’s e-hailing program was a pilot in name only and launched only because TLC Chairman David Yassky had failed to assemble sufficient votes among commission members for a permanent rule change.

“That an e-hail system might eventually be permanently implemented because the program proved to be popular, effective and lawful is not a valid argument against it,” the judge wrote. Read More »

People hail cabs at the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side on a rainy Friday night in New York.

The complaint is familiar to those following the past several months of debate in the taxi and limousine industry: upstart newcomers are skirting old rules and undermining established companies, cutting into their business.

What’s unusual is who the complaint is coming from: Uber Technologies Inc., the Silicon Valley upstart that has prided itself on just such disruption of the for-hire vehicle market.

Uber and its CEO, Travis Kalanick, have gleefully tweaked taxi companies and regulators in cities across the country as their business has grown. The company’s core service allows users to digitally hail black cars from participating livery drivers and companies in cities including San Francisco, Washington and New York. Read More »

The MTA and AT&T will hand out $50,000 in prizes over the course of the summer as the agency hopes to spur development of a new generation of mass transit-based smartphone applications.

The MTA is sponsoring its second App Quest this summer, a multi-month app design contest for developers.

But first up is a “hackathon” on May 4 and 5 at NYU Poly’s campus at Metrotech in Brooklyn. Over the two-day event, being conducted with assistance from the development platform ChallengePost, developers will be encouraged to use newly released streams of data from the MTA to build programs that help disabled customers navigate stations, give real-time service updates, and pull transit system info into other programs like calendars and email. Read More »

The small startup 29th Street Publishing is quietly trying to revolutionize magazine publishing, one app at a time.

The Midtown-based company promises to take the technical wizardry out of app making, easing the pathway to subscription revenue for those with eager — if nonpaying — online audiences. 29th Street helps its clients, drawn largely from New York City’s deep ranks of freelance writers and independent editors, develop and maintain simple apps for serialized content. The staff also provides gentle nudges to get new editions out on time.

“It’s the combination of the publishing industry shrinking, the technology and the New York, ‘get-it-doneness’ right now that’s making [this model] possible,” said David Jacobs, a company co-founder. The goal, he explained, is to help writers and editors “own and communicate directly with their audience. Also to pay writers fairly without compromising the quality of the experience.”